


mouthfall

by meatmarket



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-15 10:21:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14788698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meatmarket/pseuds/meatmarket
Summary: He doesn’t know the real name of this, just that it’s happened before, with Youngho—with others—and it’s unhappening afterwards.





	mouthfall

**Author's Note:**

> loosely but surely following slightly pre-boss era and onward if timelines are ya thing   
>  merry chewin pests

Taeyong first sees Miss Yim’s sand helmet hair four years ago, and immediately trusts her with his life. It mutates, the hair, and sometimes cycles back to its roots, like any proposed group visual concept on the coat-rack of rotating suggestions, but it never comes back completely the same.

It’s very glossed-down today, appropriating one of Miss Yim’s eyes, while Taeyong’s head fries for a fresh start like the foiled-up imported lasagna it is.

“…to start you off. You’ll be focusing and refracting, and so we want a piercing image, but for it to remain obvious they center through you, not under you. And this—” She hands him an exaggerated sketch of his features. Taeyong zeroes in on the eyebrow slit.

“And contacts?” he asks.

“Silver, originally, but I’ve settled on a liquid green. Not unexpected, but much better suited to what we’re aiming for.”

“Oh. I like that. It reminds me of…”

“Uncategorizable,” Miss Yim nods, “clean.”

All of this, to a dot, is premeditated. But Taeyong appreciates the talks like he has a say.

“More of, ah… everywhere at once,” Taeyong says, staring down at his saucered fanart eyes. “What about the members?”

“The rest of NCT U will split up the opposite sides of the spectrum, but all in good balance. As always.” 

Which means he’s just gonna have to ask them and see for himself. As always. She hands him more—magazine cut-outs frankensteined into a leafable thing. Taeyong flips through multiple versions of their freshest selves, a heavy portion of them paraphrasing dystopias and chains and dystopian chains.

Miss Yim gets her piece of produce concern in, “Have you been having trouble sleeping lately, Taeyong?”

Taeyong is reminded he’s makeupless, so sure thing she does.

“Lately,” he repeats—just repeats—and Miss Yim sees much room in it for agreement, apparently.

“One would think all those hours of dancing and hard work would make you want to hit the pillow while you still can. Of course, not being able to happens as well, sometimes. Of course. But we don’t want dark circles, do we?”

“I will do my best to sleep more,” Taeyong recites and inclines his alien head into the sizzling vanity mirror so she can see he’s, like, serious about it.

A stylist-noona emerges from her dark corner to herd him for a third round of bleach.

 

 

With an implanted scalp, Taeyong takes it for a christening soak-through to the practice room, because those were seven hours of going mad idling and, “The fewer times you wash it beforehand, the better.”

There’s going to be a touch-up just at the edge of too late before recording, anyway.

Like a q-tip, the synth boost vibrating the walls clumps cotton in Taeyong’s ear, gives the air an imaginary choke, suspending it.

Six pairs of knees quit their wobble at the drop of Taeyong’s cap.

“Ooh, our leader!” That’s Doyoung, sucking the room into pin-drop quiet with his genie hand. “So handsome!”

Xuxi says he looks like a beetroot, which Taeyong, personally, finds very hilarious, and Doyoung questions the logic of.

“Ah, are you gonna stop me?” Yoonoh is interested enough to have broken formation and watched first. “When I’m at the crosswalk, are you gonna tell me when not to go? You’re red.”

“No, but imagine if Taeyong-hyung, like, met his other color?” presents Mark. “I mean color version. Collision of realities?”

“Right, right, like right now and at MAMA, right?”

“WOOSH!” Xuxi enunciates his fringe away from his forehead with the wow of it. “Boom. The world couldn’t handle it. Too cool, man.”

“But who is the orange, then?” Sicheng asks.

“I’m pretty sure he—” It’s the brain-stop of math proportions Mark’s face is suffering. “Hyung, were you at any point orange, maybe?”

“Red light across from me, woah, woah, woah. If I’m breaking speed limit is it gonna stop me?” Yoonoh slinks back into earshot.

Mid-parquet, Taeyong counterclocks his elbow in such a dip behind his head he can taste tomorrow’s muscle fever. “If you don’t fix your locks at the beginning, I’m gonna. Unless that’s the best you can do.”

With how plain and non-fat Yoonoh’s face gets just then, he’d almost seem relaxed if not for his master recycling of the same pattern to not-express multiple feelings, sometimes in the whiplashing span of a sentence.

For the frizzy moment, it goes around. Everyone else takes notes in the shut-up department. Some manage to do it loudly. (Doyoung.)

“Everyone, I know you’re tired of me milking this, but a month is not a lot, and that’s besides the recording. It can seem far away and surreal, lives, but it will always surprise you in a way you won’t appreciate if you think you’re above it, so… remember how you’ve wanted this. Stay focused.

Mark, can you restart the track?”

“Sorry, what?”

“The track,” Taeyong says, coming up short on blinks.

Close to midnight, Xuxi makes sure he knows he looks like a beetroot, but a handsome beetroot. Taeyong sheepishly nods it off.

 

 

It’s muggy in here already and heavy on the lungs in a satisfying way.

“Oh, shit—hyung. Shit, I’m just gonna—you wanted to…?” Mark’s bat eyes bulge to twice their swell at calm, water spraying into the ajar of his mouth like he’s about to slip to his death mid-bubbles, soapy hand stuck out, if Taeyong says so.

Taeyong smiles.

Several wins earlier and onward was when the paired-up shower necessity thing became more of a lazy extravagance. Sometimes Taeyong misses it, but mostly not. He likes to be thorough on his own terms and then maybe make it double and do that with his odd angles and pokings and crack unadvertized to somebodies.

He’d made it a point not to get used to it and, that way, had no choice but discomfort.

Well. Just means neither of them are gonna have the space to jack it currently, which might’ve been the plan for at least one of the gathered here today.

“No, no.” Yes, actually, but. “It’s fine. Relax. We’ll fit, just. Can you just?”

Mark can, turns out. “If I knew you were gonna—”

“Great minds traffic alike,” Taeyong hums, unknotting his terriest cloud of a bathrobe, and that’s when Mark skids onto his ass.

“F—I’m okay! I’m fine! Sorry! Come in.”

And Taeyong thought he’d seen Mark’s junk from all vital sketch points. Life is a learning curve.

“You sure?” Taeyong gives up on physical steadying and instead hawk-eyes the situation at a cutting vantage. He unpacks a fresh bar of soap because he’d run out of his less-risky squirty one—mental note. “That looked like a bad graze.”

“I said I’m fine,” Mark says, clutching his balls by way of a fist-made hand satchel, his face all kinds of beet.

“Shouldn’t be negligent about yourself,” Taeyong grins, keeping his face out of the godly splash pressure. “What if it affects your performance? Maybe you should go for an… assessment.”

“ _Hyung_.”

“You did well today,” Taeyong says. “At practice.”

“Oh, thanks,” Mark chews on it, stretches it, “hyung.”

“All of them, actually.”

Mark rubbernecks so fast something in the universe dislocates. “When did you—”

“I liked your BOB the most, I think, probably ‘cause I like dancing with you and I saw it well from behind. You’ve been working on your back, right?”

The steam’s been rising, but Mark sounds like something badly-stifled, but good, “Yeah? Yeah, Winwinnie’s been helping me a lot, in exchange for Korean. Knows lots of body stuff I don’t, our Winwinnie.”

Taeyong thinks long, second-rounding his clavicles hard with the loofah to feel the bone resist. “I thought…”

“Well,” Mark hurries, “sometimes I sit in. While he and Doyoung-hyung study anime. I mean watch Korean. I do help out, okay! It’s in our room. And I’ve been improving my Chinese.”

“Mhm. I’m listening.”

Mark showcases. Taeyong coos.

“Hyung?”

“Yes?”

“I, uh, I think I forgot my shampoo.”

“…C’mere,” Taeyong murmurs, unduly appeased there’s fewer people today who’d forgo hair-washing in favor of doing literally anything else than there were a week ago.

Baby steps. Slow conversion.

Mark shuffles, resigned to his self-engineered fate, and lets Taeyong pirouette him under his own showerhead.

Taeyong kisses the wet chipmunk softness of Mark’s head and before it even gets a squirm in, he’s foaming it up into a mushroom of all these sulfates and whatnot. Toxic shit-free editions sting the same after bleach, except they have the redeeming quality of sitting on top like whipped cream (and holding form if he feels like having sideburns), so Taeyong will take the risk here and there.

“Is one enough? How do you do it?”

“Huh?”

Taeyong explains the mechanics of two shampoo rounds.

“Oh! No, not—” Mark slides in Taeyong’s hands like a buttered eel and blindfolds himself with eyefuls of suds in the process. “Ow! For fuck’s—I mean damn! Yikes! That hur—”

“No, keep them clo—”

“Ah! This really stings, hyung! Heeelp. Help, help.”

By the time Mark is grooving Doyoung’s part in YESTODAY, manhandled and able to see again, Taeyong is gently tipping his chin for the final washover.

He itches to ask how the lyrics have been going. If Mark’s modified his further or restarted from scratch—if he likes Taeyong’s latest enough, if he’s been sleeping at all.

Someone tries the door handle like it’s obstructing justice.

“Full, sorry,” says Mark.

“I need to pee,” Donghyuck says, cottony behind the door and water rush.

“Then? Use yo—”

“I can’t.” Donghyuck hesitates. “Jaehyun-hyung had kongjorim. I don’t want my face to melt off.”

“Really? You gonna pretend there’s only one bathroom in the whole building?”

“There’s only one behind this door.”

“I’m showering!”

“Tough luck, I don’t care if you’re dicking out again, I have my rights—”

“HYUCKIE,” Taeyong catapults several octaves off, “USE OURS, PLEASE, THANK YOU, DON’T SKIP DINNER.”

 

 

Taeyong swears he air-freshened the room before he last ate.

“Back so soon?” asks Youngho from his perch of evil timing, and Taeyong doesn’t mean to startle.

Muttering filth, he paws for the dwarf bedside lamp and saves himself any more elbow massages and potential SM lawsuits.

Maybe he’s too up in the thinking, because Youngho asks again, same thing, same feeling.

It makes Taeyong feel lazy.

Like he needs detailed receipts for himself or someone will misunderstand, but he’s not in the mood to act on anyone’s urges.

“It’s late. I’ve also been told I look like shit, apparently, so I’m in the business of fixing my face with a healthy five of beauty sleep.”

From his bodily splay, Youngho just stares, one hand under his blanket.

“It looks bad on camera,” Taeyong explains blandly.

“Who said that?”

“No one. It’s obvious.”

“Not that—who said you looked like shit?”

Taeyong has his professional on-the-brink oversharing to thank for not finishing opening the window all the way, and now his interface is stuck oscillating between which to get back to. Pick, pick, pick.

Pick, pick.

He looks to Youngho’s lap, where a pillow has also materialized, then at Youngho’s face. Another pick, right there, self-presenting.

“I like the hair,” Youngho says in abrupt English, and doesn’t seem to be lying, just kind of out of breath.

“I think Mark is getting tired,” Taeyong spurts. He stops the twirl at his ear, the hair slipping through his fingers like blistered mini scales. The synthetic feel only ever soothes him when it’s complete, which it’s still days away from.

Youngho blinks. “We’re all tired. But yeah. That’s what happens when they’re gearin’ you up to one day sit on the throne.”

Taeyong scrambles onto the lower bunk and has no trouble benching himself to Youngho’s re-arranging inconvenience, who’s got no choice but turn into a tight blanket maki.

“Mark Lee, SM’s benevolent emperor, may he have mercy on us,” Taeyong snorts into his appropriated pillow.

Gargoyled against the bed’s ladder like that, he makes out Youngho through contrast, mostly, because his back is eating up the shitty little bulb’s struggle. “He’s still a baby. Young. Not grown-up, unfit for ruling.”

“That’s why he’s growing his turn,” says Youngho. “It’s a surname thing, leader. Just you wait ‘til you start to creak.”

Done, Taeyong thinks wryly. Instead, “But you’re still going. You’ve been keeping going, I mean, for a long time, even though sometimes…”

Another compulsive itch to boot, just like that. This one’ll die when the moment does, but he wants to shift sideways and let a wink of light through, see what this silence is about. How much of it is uncomfortable.

“So have you,” Youngho finally says, “but neither of us have done it alone.”

Only by the white sheen of Youngho’s aimed unblinking does Taeyong realize they’re watching each other.

“Why didn’t you stop by?”

“Why didn’t I stop by?”

Taeyong’s hand performs a frantic air stitch. “After DREAM practice.”

“There was a DREAM practice?”

“There was, like, cake. The kids had fun, and caramel bread.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, dude, I’m on that New Year’s diet,” Youngho’s voice kicks unnaturally high into barbie frequency, watering, until it ripples into a snigger. “How good?”

“So good,” Taeyong relishes. “Red velvet, orange… vanilla.”

“Oh, vanilla!”

“ _Oh, vernilla_.”

“What? What’s laughing, why’re you funny.”

Taeyong’s found a blanket frizz to loop his antisocial pinky through, so now it’s a tug-of-war with a mountain of Youngho who doesn’t even register the effort.

“Hey,” Youngho says.

“Hm?”

“Hey, don’t you worry about Mark. He’s still very excited about all of this, ‘specially now that we’re—you know. He’ll bounce back.”

“Always does,” Taeyong sighs. “But.”

“But you worry.”

Maybe it’s the pitch limbo Youngho’s plunged them into (shuffle—click), but it almost feels like he could be smiling, just now. That’s a thing Youngho would do.

In mild panic of it somehow, somewhy, Taeyong looks above his head, presumably at the wooden ribs of his top bunk’s claustrophobia he’ll have to board soon.

But if he’s not falling asleep courtesy of one serving of reason only, there’s a hierarchy to it. “Hey, it kind of smells in here. You should rinse it.”

 

* * *

 

Even their van smells like the inside of a bread oven, except they’re the ones rising and sticky.

Taeyong feels like pop rocks. Like he’s in someone’s mouth and crackling loose into the backseat, trickling down and popping colors. Maybe glitter will start pouring out of his ass.

Been a while since he saw through the swollen filter of tipsy, not unlike swimming through soup. It takes a couple tacky swipes to unlock his screen, a couple giggles more to thumb off the sweatprints. They remind him of little oil slicks on the sidewalk.

He wants to Google that.

As Mark centipedes by dangerous centimeters to the front seat row, he offers Taeyong an over-the-shoulder continuation of his hand massage, “With a discount, hyung, of corpse. Course. Day-mn,” not realizing he’s actually peddling to Yoonoh, who’s gone method.

Personal hot water bottle for the hip, and Taeyong’s at that, is what the rolling credits spell next to his name.

Sidling up, Yoonoh’s got his hood cocooned around his pink face. Its fur fringe clings to his cheeks and he looks so cute zonked and smiling stupid, a few seconds in the past, but not on purpose this time.

“First step to recovery is admitting you have a problem,” Yoonoh leans so intimate into Taeyong’s phone, the relief disfigures his face.

“It’s Youngho. Johnny-John, your hyung.”

Yoonoh hiccups, jerking Taeyong’s head on his shoulder over a nasty pothole just as the camera flash flares and Taeyong drops his hand. “Shit…”

“Everyone here?” the manager asks.

“Yes,” says Taeyong, loud so it travels to the front, then softens back to Yoonoh. “He doesn’t get to see, so I’m documenting. Also for the group chat, we can’t forget the group chat.”

He scouts tonight’s contenders—including the one he’s just snapped, especially that—into a batch of cyber art, cherry-topping it with a blurred giggly Mark snuggled limp into Sicheng’s neck like a strip of melted Canadian cheese.

“Wait, wait—” Yoonoh gropes around his pockets. “You can’t post it incomplete…” He pulls up some pixels and zooms in violently on a nostril. “This masterpiece, that needs to go.”

“Go?”

“With it. How do you eat the main course deliciously without, without knowing the dessert follows? That’s like… eating pizza without pineapple.”

“You do need balance,” Taeyong deadpans, and sends himself a drooling Doyoung on the plane from Yoonoh’s phone.

His free hand brackets Yoonoh’s thigh, the road rocking them, and Yoonoh’s legs open wider just so under his palm, sliding it.

The snow is a shy powdering of whitewash crust that the city keeps blinking through, a dull throb of little life that reminds him of resignation. It throws him back into the Christmas lights feel.

Courtesy of Jungwoo’s blue veins, the car heating grills them into a cohesive damp sandwich, and it’s one of those circumstantial discomforts Taeyong could break no sweat ridding himself of—so what happens is, he loses his bones to it instead.

“I’ve eaten so much,” Yoonoh deflates. His breath smells like liver and lots of bad candy. Wonder if that was what he and Mark needed a private regrouping sec to get properly engrossed in. “I’m so pregnant. Need a trash compactor. Honestly, I have a newfound respect for those who carve cabbages.”

“I wanted more,” he tells Yoonoh’s hood, blinking at the sᴇɴᴛ ✓.

Xuxi is punching the air with all his spirit’s worth and gangling over Doyoung and Jungwoo like a spasming octopus when the chorus of the song Taeyong hasn’t been paying attention to tips over, and his voice thins so bad it jerks Mark awake.

“HEY HEY HEY yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah,” Mark answers, disoriented.

Taeyong’s chest squeezes, and he wants to freeze that in a photo, too.

A poke cold as a champagne glass shocks Taeyong’s jaw—which it always is, Yoonoh’s nose, as the single point of his body in preemptive morgue mode. Taeyong’s relieved sigh doesn’t get far, just rebounds back from Yoonoh’s mouth.

Yoonoh kisses him, misaligned and wet and all in his space. And it’s nice, it’s an old ache, having someone touch him.

It’s true what someone once told him, that all people ever pay attention to in the dark is themselves.

“Hyung is so pretty. So… pretty, ah,” he laughs into Taeyong’s cheek, spitting a little. “What for?”

 

* * *

 

Taeyong is the only person in the world.

He feels the prickle and pluck of sound boosted to a drowning size and the granules of the beat and the beat rippling into the floor as he steps on it.

Almost feels like a fever dream. And would, with how sedated his legs are, but he never dreams of dance practices.

In the low, low-dropped light, all this distance mirrors back at him is a silhouette in a clot of dark. His mask helps both with not having a face and to more strain his breathing. He’s gross and dripping and the red points all over his body make him aware of many of his bones jutting to aches, pulsing the sharpest behind his rib.

Remember milk teeth, the last one hanging by the soft meat of nerves? Taeyong remembers his, he remembers tugging at it, getting annoyed at it. He remembers ripping it out, but that was way tiny compared to a—

His belt buckle really chafes.

Blinking hair out of his eyes, he bambi-walks through the ring in his muscles and crouches by the PA.

That was none of the official discography, just now. Nothing as industrial or prescribed or unit-oriented. The shame in that takes a breather after a dayful of not being able to get away from the crowd of it all.

Like dust coming off, Taeyong sheds the smallness for his full mass and cracks his fingers in mirrored tandem of twos simultaneously.

He breathes deep into his belly. Returns the practice room into a frying pan, with lights glaring so nasty, so multiplied through the mirror walls, that his scar jumps into focus. He tugs the face mask from his slick cheeks down to his throat, still tasting the new-shoe feel of the floors even though he’s gotten more than a few heads-ups about his skid marks.

You get very into it, they would say, and that’s good. That’s good. Just dress accordingly. Shoe code, okay?

Okay, Taeyong thinks, shuffling in his blackest Chelseas.

So close—he’s so close he could make out with the smudge someone P.S.’d on the mirror.

Instead he waits until he’s done heaving as he chases a scratch where his jaw juts the most and his finger slips from the force, so he moves on to his eyelid which doesn’t stretch very far up at all when he tries.

Knees locked, he begins.

 

* * *

 

“You seem nervous,” Taeyong says.

Before he sharpens back into reality, Ten lags, in all his liquid hurry of jewelry and shimmering neck glitching at once with the speed of his _no_ s and half-baked excuses.

Those run dry, and the receiving end of awkwardness always fascinates Taeyong to the point of fostering it, unless he’s under the proximity-triggered moral contract not to further traumatize his real dongsaengs. Could be why he loves to just let it hang and watch otherwise, no additives.

It’s a cooking show, except you put people in the bowl.

“What?” Ten asks, then changes his mind. “We’ll do well, hyung, right?”

“Right. We’ll work hard to present a—” But Taeyong sounds pretentious and prematurely, too, he knows, and not only thanks to Ten’s projection.

“If you handle the first one relatively well,” Taeyong edits, “your body’s gonna get used to the stress and just repeat what you teach to it. Possibly get better as the week goes.”

“Have you ever thrown up?”

“Before stage?” Ten nods. “No.”

Ten looks like he’s deciding if he likes that or not. “So confident, but you weren’t even at the rehearsal.”

“We’ve practiced a lot when we could. We’ll just carry that over to the stage, Tennie. It’s just more people.”

Ten sounds less pistoned and more like leaning into a touch when he next breathes deep. “Where do I look?”

“Didn’t you rehearse? Didn’t they give you the camera plan?”

“Yes, yes, but—where do you look?”

Taeyong shakes his head. “Just do what you would do.”

Taeyong’s first real performance, he couldn’t breathe proper just before the lights started melting him to butter, sweating his turtleneck into a mollusk. His head felt like three and his mind was being ugly.

What spiritually moved him to near tears was the dumb luck of having playback to piggyback on. Ten should know, he was there with him.

Yoonoh’s _Good luck_ waits in his top bar first.

Under that: _**youngho:** weirdest thing […]_

Under that: Renjun, abusing his group chat status for another one of his personal dilemmas. Find five differences, Jeno’s face (left) and an uncannily-arranged meme (right) edition.

Jeno’s typing bubble grimly alternates fading in and out of ellipsis, which Taeyong assumes soon-to-be bounty for someone’s head, unfiltered.

_doyoung is typing…_

Taeyong mentions the kids, all of it, to kill the silence.

“Chat? With the Dreamies,” Ten says. “Another one?”

Taeyong should be less surprised at this, and he watches a staff-noona de-silver Ten back to his net weight. “It didn’t use to be. It’s honestly so chaotic, now.”

“Oh?”

“You wanna join?” Taeyong guesses. Never too early for damage control. “I’ll add you.”

But he doesn’t, and unwrapping his texts almost feels like a valid-enough rain check.

 _ **youngho**_  
  weirdest thing  
  there was an attempt on my life this morning.

 ** _taeyong_  
**   lousy work on whoever’s part then eh?

 _youngho is typing.._.

 _ **youngho**_  
  a box with my name on it  
  upon inspection, the would-be asses turned out to be of 20x20 proportions  
  *assassin  
  and positioned too close to the bed to trace back to pure intentions.  
  know anything about that?

 ** _taeyong_  
**   just keeping my promises

Barely two blinks in, as if it’s been waiting its turn on a conveyor belt all day, an attached photo pops up. Youngho in his new training shoes.

“What’s funny?” Ten asks as he plugs his ear with his piece, watching.

 

 

He still has his plastic face clicked on when he de-mounts the stage, other side than Ten. MBC love their dramatic splits.

And there’s this one girl, a staff-noona. She stares and she stares from behind her clipboard, cheeks like peach. Keeps staring even after Taeyong’s asked her clipboard (politely) for directions (bowing), if you wouldn’t mind? I haven’t entered this way, so I don’t… know. How to get back.

His contacts stick like sand when he blinks, dragging at the tender of the inside of his eyelid. The feeling this is giving him, might as well be standing on moving tetris.

He should file this away in a memory pocket for later. Illie-hyung is going to inform Taeyong he probably just walked into his own energy that hadn’t been there yet, some déjà vu.

Those he’s been having lots.

Taeyong realizes that’s not a staff-noona.

Single-minded as one, though, gotta give it to her. Time-wise, she’s dripping wax. Just as Taeyong grinds his heel to corkscrew back where he came from, she unglues from his face, dominoing down his body, and stops in the middle. Stops on the left.

Taeyong looks where she’s looking and finds his hand shaking.

 

* * *

 

The kitchen area is neither here nor there, except down the hall.

White wall, white tile, like overalls matching above and below and perfectly sterile for some illusionist reason. Stuff like when a drought wakes you up in the middle of the night only to realize, once in front of the sink, you need to go piss first, but why is everything one continuous pour in the dark and where’s the map.

And no way nine guys live someplace with a white kitchen and make clean look like their first instinct.

That is, they have to—which Taeyong is the first to subtly threaten in the name of—but today, apparently, they don’t.

“Who left here last?”

Mark and Youngho, the single conspiratory person huddle awake, are Englishing too loud to care about courtesy.

Taeyong slaps against the counter. “Hey. Who was the last to leave the kitchen after practice?”

Mark gapes, loading… “Oh, uh, Hyuck was hungry, so I said let’s make some rice, right, but it… stuck where it shouldn’t, kinda, and it was kinda gross, so we made instant—”

“And left it like this? How many times have I—” Taeyong yawns out all his teeth, ending in that sawlike noise from the gut that’s not a burp and not a growl but food-adjacent by association.

Mark’s face rounds up in slow expectant horror. He gulps. Some of the mortar-and-pestled gosomi in his mouth chip off and slick-powder down his chin.

Taeyong shakes his head a moderate amount and turns back to the crackling skillets.

The bleary space-out of mornings, so like jetlag, mutes him into selective micromanaging focus. He’s been staring at the crusted-over pan handle for the past few past fews. Looks like bean paste, or dried-up nosebleed.

Taeyong can’t remember the last time bean paste’d made it into the cupboards.

Crunch.

Staticky crunch. More, more.

Next to the radio, Youngho fiddles with the knob until his Lord-bestowed DJ-ing powers convince it of what he needs, which is to say, too jazzy for whatever hour it shouldn’t be, sticking like it’s jam and Taeyong is a fly.

Crunchcrunchcrun…

“Mark-yah, close your mouth when you eat,” Taeyong grumbles.

“Little help there, chef?” Youngho asks, but Taeyong just bumps him out of his way to turn-turtle the fattest one among the French toast cavalry. Warm and yolky, fluffed up like the sun and all things good in the world.

Trying to sync eating and last time doing this, Taeyong tongues away the drool in the corner of his mouth.

“Ah, that’s right,” Youngho comments. “I forgot. He doesn’t talk yet. Only nags.”

“Plate’s on your left,” Taeyong says.

 

 

They fall into a rhythm together, the two of them, less kinetic than Taeyong knows naturally, but he adapts. They fish out tender coins of gold bread from the slick sea Youngho says looks like Cholesterol, toweling them off on the napkin shore.

“What say you?”

“Hm?” Taeyong stops pouring. A fleshy spider of warmth steadies the back of his neck to match Youngho’s other approaching airplane hand. In the middle of his juice duty crisis, Taeyong bites too soon, too thick, and flinches.

It speaks deep into Youngho’s knee-jerk reflex, which goes a bit like steady hand, cooing laugh—pinching Taeyong’s cheek?

Taeyong doesn’t care, just slurps against the air. Just thinks.

How big Youngho’s hand was just now, so close to his throat.

“Good?”

Taeyong nods, looking away. “I’m talented.”

“What?” Yuta defends, rounding the corner with Sicheng and co. in tow like a string of semi-hypnotized chicks, before Doyoung pushes past him. “He could be dead. Sleep overdose is a thing.”

“I love life,” Doyoung says, sniffing over Taeyong and Youngho’s siamesed shoulders. Taeyong barely registers flicking off his infiltrating fingers.

Yuta’s smug chin tilt is vaguely reminiscent of instilling the fear of God in lesser men’s hearts for personal enjoyment. “Aha. Just wait ‘til you watch our little Mark’s Life Bar, here.” (“What? No, no, no, hahaha, hyung, wait, no…”) “Boy, do I have your life in my hands. Literally. Who wants to see?”

“Where’s Donghyuck?” Taeyong asks. He nips excess fried egg from Youngho’s hand and arranges everything chewy and sugary into a proper half-circle on the table.

“I got it, I got it! I’ll fetch him!” Mark offers, rushing so bad it leaves a paper trail.

“Jaehyun-ah,” Taeyong crowds into him, plops down between him and Youngho. “Jaehyun-aaah, have some.”

Have some Yoonoh doesn’t, just waits wide open. Just shows the world around his mouth, so toothy it strains his cheeks to their farthest pale taffiness.

Which, all in all, is a feudal system Taeyong hadn’t explicitly stopped from developing, so he might as well credit himself with a stock share in it.

He holds out a bite-sized sponge, heartily berried, and holds out as Yoonoh licks around his knuckles for any unmopped-up sirup. Of which there’s none.

Unanimously voted closest to a selfie stick, Youngho’s arm maneuvers Yuta’s phone to the ideal group viewing pleasure. A bit of tweaking. There.

Then some more of the same.

“Can you move your sausage fingers, please?” Yuta asks.

Youngho, in fact, can, and, passing the phone down to Doyoung to maintain peace, he wedges one of them underneath Taeyong’s many-looped bracelet. Elbowing Yuta is just part of his transit.

“Doesn’t look like you’ll be seeing much of anything, anyway,” Youngho says from under the great burden of knowledge, the way he often gets.

At this angle, Taeyong can see his pimpled chin that he couldn’t yesterday, under layers of faces. Might be why Youngho needs a shave and smells out of focus. A bit sleepy, which means he hasn’t put fragrance on yet.

Yuta scowls at the non-buffering, then snatches his phone back. “What kind of perpetrator of false information is Ten? Solid sources don’t send spam links. Seriously. Seriously, this is why he doesn’t live with us.”

“Keep your friends close,” Doyoung hums past a raspberry.

“Yuta,” Taeyong says through the medicine ball having a field day in his head, and nods to the rapidly-slimming cushiony heap in the middle of the table.

But Yuta waves him off, his ear cartilage clinking.

“Too heavy.”

“Too Canadian?” Youngho grins.

“Too French,” Doyoung corrects.

“Is wuhwishus,” Yoonoh mangles around a glop of Taeyong’s pureéd cuisine skills.

“Indeed,” Youngho muses. “Doesn’t it just remind you of your ripe young days of living in America?”

“Mark picked it,” Taeyong tells Yuta. “He really likes it. You’ll get to pick next time.

Who hasn’t had yet? Winwinnie?”

Yoonoh tries to convey, Taeyong’s pretty sure, something other than his current mouthful.

“Mercy,” Youngho holds up his palm policeman-style, a fluffy sickle of hair stabbing near his eye. “A Jaehyun who’s capable of eating and talking? Truly an evolutionary stage the people aren’t ready for yet.”

Taeyong’s smile is a skinny stitch just for himself, until it pressure-cooks and sputters with all the relief of a bruise being acknowledged at last, pressed to the full ache.

And here and there, just now and then, Taeyong feels isolated in these gutted parcels of sameness even though the core of his world, each eighth of the half of it, walks the same halls. Breakfasts at the same table with him.

Here and there, he feels it gut him in the head, too.

He doesn’t like playing this kind of observer in his own body with this kind of audience, so he redirects the weight to Youngho’s centimeters-away slopey face. To his bluntly swept-down nose. On his fat upper lip, how nice it sits like that, not even doing anything.

Taeyong wonders if he’s ever had it bitten down to twice its bounce.

He doesn’t know the real name of this, just that it’s happened before, with Youngho—with others—and it’s unhappening afterwards.

 

* * *

 

Someone jumps too soon and someone slides too late, but it’s Taeyong sledgehammering to his knees to the sound he knows from dinner, from cracking gristle open with his teeth.

The footwork unblurs, everyone stilling when the ripple effect rolls over them. Yuta picks himself up a shadow second after Taeyong does, mouth moving in Japanese. Immediately, Doyoung’s face is drawn funnily hard, tongue clicking.

“If Yuta has something to say to me,” Taeyong says, “he can do it to my face, right?”

“I’m tired of your ego.”

Eighteen at once is a lot of people in one rectangle to distinctly not move.

Then Xuxi vibrates between Taeyong and Yuta. Asks, “His aegyo?”

The background music is still on.

“I told you it was time for a breather,” Yuta says, breathing thick.

“And I said you could take one if you felt you couldn’t keep up.”

And Taeyong knows Yuta better than the back of his hand, could nitpick him deeper than the guts, down to the tiniest cogs that make up the factory of him and pick one up like, this is to trigger pride and this one right against it is the urge to go for the throat.

But Yuta just leaves. Nobody talks for the rest of the practice.

 

* * *

 

This time around, they lose their beds on a Thursday, Taeyong thinks it is. The Russian Thursday.

“I miss the hair,” Taeyong tosses in their hotel room.

“Simpler life. Greener pastures,” Youngho agrees, wet like a dog and toweled around the hips. It’s always the skyscrapers with minimalist fashion. “Does it itch?”

“No.”

“Mine sometimes does. Conclusion? It’s taking back its soil. Should I tell it or should you?”

“No, I,” Taeyong says, “meant yours. Miss yours, kind of.”

Passing condolences to the patch of bacon crying down his temples that, what if, isn’t doing it for the general audiences, Youngho combs it back and opens up his face. What if it’s not, each of his sweeps says, what if it’s really not.

It’s the sort of bubble gum silence where any twitch is a mountain swallowing itself.

“Blacker pastures,” Taeyong finds himself idioting.

Youngho loses something when he full-body laughs that always makes him smaller, and Taeyong thinks maybe it’s the shoulders, maybe they don’t push out for that moment, but pack him all cute and international parcel instead.

Taeyong doesn’t know what to do with that, so with a delay, he resumes his lint-rolling. Its nearing-the-brink-of-death rattle is the perfect white noise tailor for ignoring tomorrow’s rehearsal. Which is all they get pre-stage, no solid practice. Deal with that. 

Deal, and there’s a suspicious movement on the turf, Taeyong’s three o’clock.

“What are you doing.”

“Kimchi,” Youngho holds the vowels. No later than, Taeyong’s having to blink little emmental ulcers off from his vision.

It rewinds him several eyebags back across the sea, to Youngho’s other camera. The irreparable one from Ukraine Taeyong got him because he loves all manner of old things. Youngho’s got it displayed in Korea.

A bit wistfully, he wonders if still nothing?

“Still nothing,” Youngho confirms, viewing the photo. “Probably for all time, nothing. Shouldn’t force it outside its era, maybe that’s why, that’s what it’s saying. It doesn’t matter, not really. I like it as is.”

“Things are memorable because they end, people say that,” Taeyong says. He’s not actually sure that’s what people say. “Isn’t that why you like to take pictures?”

With how loud and hard to read Youngho’s mind is, there should be a perpetual finger over his cupid’s bow where he puts it sometimes when he’s exaggerating his thinking. 

“Maybe,” he says, “but I don’t think of it like that. To me, it keeps the moment going… by remembering it… Hey, stop that.”

He does, but absent-minded, lowering his fingers from his mouth.

 

 

Youngho sets about lightening Taeyong’s hands, pulling rings off like pulling belts off of dry earthworms. He squirts an additional curly white worm of lotion into his palm, its tail (head?) looking up when it cuts away from the cap.

At this point, they’re just satisfyingly one-upping each other in piling onto the pyre at SM’s feet.

And how hilariously anxious was it that manager-hyungs cobbled a, ha, schedule for machines, in their dungeon HQ? Very.

Like, just one. Give us just one full day to see behind Moscow’s ribs and half another one to try to sleep better than at two times two-hour intervals.

Or suckerpunch it all into a packed continuum of bodyache, that’s more along the lines of what they’re used to. All they’re missing, now—if things are missable while choke-laughing—are dumbbell-sized wine glasses for bigheads to go with all the dumb.

“SM is exceptionally good at dicking around when they want to,” Taeyong says for no reason in particular.

“Or letting you get one in,” says Youngho.

And weird. Taeyong can hear pins dropping all over the beige room, and all over his skin, too.

A dry dick is a sad dick, is the thing, yeah. Sad dick doesn’t execute well. One of those cosmetic flaws, and that practice is across the board knowledge as common as it is glossed over, is the other thing.

There are employees for that, too. Who oversee these things.

Any glossing, it looks like, got effectively slurped into the irretrievable donut of timezone vacuum.

If Youngho’s edges were any fuller they’d shimmer, he’s that pent-up with something. Taeyong understands because it’s a wide selection of reasons to pick from around here, a free buffet. Whatever you want on your stress sandwich.

Maybe Youngho notices but he doesn’t stop the spreading, the touching. “At least that’s what Ten tells me.”

They’ve never talked about this. “He does.”

“And I tell him—” If all that up until now wasn’t American enough, Youngho’s finger twirls in a _he crazy_ motion.

Taeyong snorts. Then big, big hands. Taeyong gives his wrist, open-palmed to the thumbing pressure slipping into the center. His fingers twitch. Youngho bends the whole row of them into rubber, it seems, and Taeyong does make a sound, sighing his balloon sigh.

He could melt, it makes him feel so filmy and thin, his skin could just lift right off, layer by layer. He doesn’t remember being this narrow next to Youngho, quite this collapsed shade of milk. 

“Talk a lot about this, the two of you?”

“We talk about everything. Ten’s got a big mouth, and I usually get a big headache.”

“He likes you,” Taeyong hums.

“He doesn’t eat fruit,” Youngho scoffs like that explains everything. It kind of does. The lotion squelches and scoops behind his trimmed nails.

Taeyong realizes he’ll want the selfie stick for tomorrow, it’ll look pretty, grabbing for his face from among the architecture of the front balcony. He tells Youngho this.

“Yuta has it, I think, with him,” Youngho says, all breezy. Shifts on the block of cheese queen mattress, reaching to do Taeyong’s other hand. “321, right across from us.” 

When Taeyong says he’s good, what happens is what he knew would happen. “He didn’t mean it like that, you know.”

“I know how he meant it.”

Youngho’s final skim forgets his fingers over Taeyong’s first knuckles, leaves them there. “How’s your knee doing?”

The magnifying glass sensation is back. This time, he feels himself freezing down to the threads of his muscle, slow to recover.

“Not doing anything, right now,” Taeyong says, continuing to sit, which Youngho can see very personally.

“So you can bend it just fine and everything, no problem.”

No problem, Taeyong repeats.

“Stop acting,” Youngho jokes, and it’s maybe the flattest it’s ever fallen.

Distinctly Youngho-less and moisturized to silk, his hands are working up a slip to the indoor temperature overcompensation.

“Wasn’t it supposed to be snowing?” he asks, all his white sawdust burl and snow globe stereotypes he’d crammed before takeoff left squashed, the fairy tale of it all, like that famous one, what’s the, that one—Matryoshka?

“If you want—” Youngho starts. Waits until he’s acknowledged.

“I can go get that selfie stick. Maybe watch a movie with Haechan, while you,” Youngho motions. Taeyong stares. “Or I can… help with that.”

That. That that that. The walnut in Taeyong’s head’s wrinkling out of its remaining juice, but he stays as he is.

Maybe Youngho’s rubdown felt too good, like all things raw and human at once, and maybe it’s obvious, now, just how down it went to feel.

“You,” Taeyong copies, monotonous.

“If you want me to, sure,” Youngho says, sounding along the wavelength of a shrug. It rubs Taeyong the wrong way. “I started it. You’re obviously frustrated.”

“Yeah? Who’re you telling?”

Peripherally, Youngho’s jaw ticks. Peripherally, Taeyong registers him licking his lips. It’s like spying on a first. “Would it help you relax? If I did this. Could it?”

It sounds like business. Referential in a self-referral way, like he knows he’ll do his best, but what if Taeyong isn’t in on the transaction.

Chest heavy, Taeyong looks at him, his oldest friend. Sometimes still his only friend. It’s what happens, he guesses, when you lock things up and own them and look at them even in passing when you’re bored. Like having Youngho there to graduate with him. Like gagging on that disgusting wedding cake, or when Youngho dreams loud nonsense.

The towel is folding saturated pink into his happy trail where it’s soaked through, pudging Youngho’s soft belly part over it. Groggy eyes, bowcut mouth, thick rope half-tan biceps. Bacon hair.

Taeyong could cry.

He tries for something unselfish. “Yes.”

They’re sat on the edge of the bed when Youngho accordions close, so much skin, but Taeyong’s shins still dangle over without toeing the floor like it’s a tall, tall bench at the Han river except the time of the sky is flipped, dipped dim, and so is the surroundings’ openness. 

Taeyong tells him that’s exactly what this reminds him of and isn’t surprised when Youngho glitches.

“This?” Youngho’s face makes this whole deal scientific, so concentrated but there are holes. Trust him not to multitask well, his hand cupping Taeyong’s knee into a little apple. His hand working up a steady knead up Taeyong’s thigh, palming between his legs, but his mouth hanging.

Pillared against his hands, Taeyong tilts back and uses that momentum to rut up into the heel of Youngho’s palm. To find a tidy sync, Youngho realizes when to counter-pressure and when to supple, and Taeyong misses the cues because he takes them from Youngho’s texturing forearm.

The dry chafe, that tacky something under Taeyong’s tongue. Everything about this says watch. Watch. Watching himself twitch through the sweats, he goosebumps so bad it just might be scarring.

Doesn’t feel that good, having to keep himself ramrod not to fuck up his balance and flop. There’s not enough yoga and uncongested chakra tunnels in Taeyong’s body, and Youngho’s knuckles make it worse in their press-and-catch over his clothed semi. Nosing at Taeyong’s cheek, he swallows.

“This isn’t really—” Youngho squirms as though about to make a beeline. If he is, Taeyong’s asking him to fetch him his white painkiller packet. Taeyong’s short-circuiting.

“Just spit.”

So that’s what that button does when he jabs it. Gratifying, too, making Youngho eat his dust in saying things, and Taeyong watches like he didn’t say anything, just now.

“Make the angle better,” Youngho says then.

Taeyong’s stickwork of limb squeaks awake the colony of ditched foam polystyrene containers, what’s left of what they’d had for dinner. And the food was food, it was local, but local tastes like whichever plate on the table you fork from, it’s the same thing going through different stages of salt and paprika.

Taeyong scoots until one of those European pillows on steroids sinks under his neck like whipped cream, peeling his sweats off. No underwear.

It’s cool on his dick and so, so good, but Youngho’s hot breath bakes it away. How he’s crumpled inside the parentheses of Taeyong’s outforked knees, he’ll need a new spine soon. As he gets handsy, little by little, the veiny back of Youngho’s hand works up a slick from his spit, he’s so loose-fisted about it.

Being made to angle for it, Taeyong likes that. So like the tingles of when blood gluts up there, in the paper spaces of skin.

“More,” he mutters, watching the next fizzy stretch of drool tickle down his stomach. He can smell his own arousal from where he’s lying, all of himself. His blush kind of burns.

It’s a strange bout of static, his dick catching under Youngho’s chin when he kisses Taeyong’s belly button. Then long, tight sucks, right over the head. Sounds wetter than slurping ramyeon.

Youngho’s lips are so pillowy, padded enough to have a give when he mouths down along Taeyong, into the hair. Back up. His mouth feels plasticky swollen around the gums, draping cotton up through his nose. Youngho makes such a pretty molten sound, so pretty, barely stitched-together.

Taeyong wants to know real bad. Out of all the arranged times, how often Youngho went for guys, if at all.

First he smears himself on Youngho’s chin, dipping at the base. Taeyong jerks himself shallow, and it echoes, only the head touching to Youngho’s tongue. Every downstroke, the string of pre-come extends, elastic.

It pops when Youngho says, “You’re drooling.”

Taeyong is wiped sore. And underneath the towel, Youngho is hard. He’s hard and fidgety in the hipline and so thick, he likes this, and Taeyong doesn’t even get to see. Fuck, he.

His stomach aches with how much he wants to come down Youngho’s throat. The way he’s wired right now, though, stapler marks around his dick really aren’t what he’s after. But it’s the good, great kind of robotic, fucking into that point where everything is so very touchy and he’s impossibly delicate and goes twice the rough for it, and his skin just doesn’t fucking end.

Taeyong starts moaning. People eat this sort of shit up, right? Get off on it. He’s nasty and nonstop, pitched so steep and leaking down his knuckles, staring Youngho down slantwise as his one hand starfishes over Taeyong’s belly and the other pries his thigh, forcing it into the bed. It kind of hurts. Taeyong almost laughs.

“Ah. I’m…”

Youngho’s big-ass hand overlaps the head of his dick. “Not on my face, Taeyongie.”

“Why not?” he pouts, but chews his lip back in before Youngho is gone to it and breaking, breaking. He likes that cute shit too much, and Taeyong can’t blame him.

Taeyong’s frenzy wrings him to the deep. He fists tighter around himself, loosening his tempo into a lazy full drag. He can see his middle nail isn’t what it used to be. He sees blood in the nailbed that’ll just have to grow out of there and sees a missing chunk, but at least stylist-noonas won’t ever not work for a living.

He loves how snug it gets when he uses both his hands, but Youngho is back on that kissing bullshit, all over Taeyong’s shaky thighs.

“Lick,” he grinds, clearing his throat. “Just lick, low.”

The bed shifts like liquid when Youngho does, half of his face glazed and eyes blown black to some kind of other sheen. There’s significantly more wet at Taeyong’s balls, unpatterned and kittenish, and when he comes, jolting so bad, it doesn’t stop.

It doesn’t and it doesn’t.

Taeyong’s swimming in gelatin but it’s hard to push at anything with arms and legs this dried to useless starch.

“Thanks,” he tells Youngho, not sounding like anyone. Thanks.

 

* * *

 

The days pour together worse than usual.

Cap slung so low over his eyes, Taeyong is part of a slow-moving insect. The airport’s seams had packed hours before they landed, and now they’re squeezing through the corridor of warm meat that people decided to make, like an ant-hive.

As in if it caught fire, it’d be a while from the epicenter to the outer edge where someone caught on. Not the first time, but he notes how easily he gives his back, now.

He’s been domesticated not to be hung up on these things that he’d inherently used to be hung up on a whole lot, at least just long enough for them to happen. Walls of people. Lots of eyes. Lots of giving your back, or your that or other, whether or not that’s your salad preference.

So often it’s just taking, many someones stealing bits of his skin. But he takes it back in his own under-the-radar ways.

The security guards, they crabwalk it.

Taeyong watches from inside the foggy intestine of guards, their arms winding like bicycle chain. Stuff, right off the bat, that lets him know he’ll need eye drops after. There come the flashes.

Maybe some breathing exercises, too.

Snap snap snap.

And, as expected, there are the screams, reminding Taeyong what his name is.

Winwin, I love you.

Mark Lee, yoooo.

Disembodied hands dip through the unsecuritied holes. Their lovely Seasonies, Taeyong peeks and sees forearms and beyond that, people chipping basic human decency off of each other one shove at a time.

One of the guards, he wheezes too close to Taeyong’s neck. He tiptoes, then jostles double, triple the anger back into the people soup trying for his toupée. Each time it’s the most embarrassing energy conversion Taeyong’s ever been the point of.

Screams are the bread and butter, but cries, those not quite. So when one pokes through from someplace soft and dark like a lava cake splitting, Taeyong should be either alert or deaf to it with all his training.

It fucks with his being a person so bad he missteps. Youngho frontrows into him and nearly takes Taeyong’s Vans off.

Security mister’s armpit has sprouted a Kyushu. Chewing around his thumb, Taeyong checks if it’s got the peninsulas down that look like flailing baby legs.

They push out after much labor, and he’s shapeless after that, this distortion about going from having to be hyper-aware of holding his body together specifically the airport way to not.

He takes in the evening chill like he’s an inflatable, sucking in, sucking in.

Taeyong is the forehead of the line, more or less, so he’s also the one to determine the waiting spot for their car. First batch: Youngho, Taeil, and Yuta, all fanny-packed at his side. This instinctual panic he has, of forgetting something he’ll regret, makes him size up the remaining members on his periphery. Just to make sure the current number is right. It is.

Breathing like this feels good. When it goes wide into his ribs, a bit new again. Taeyong’s leg is doing that jittery thing it does and when he’s done wiping at his cupid’s bow, Youngho is looking down at his mouth.

Their ride, always shiny, always black and too big, wheels just to the edge of Taeyong’s thoughts, and the door is opened for them. Always is.

Taeyong feels a backward half-a-step tug in his balance. He realizes to get in the car, he has to unloop his and Youngho’s ring fingers first.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  [[noncommittal yodellin]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWPZ-gXU3xM)   
> 


End file.
